Fiction. Is there hope within even the darkest hearts? A woman has sex with her dead mother's husband. A child sleeps in a makeshift nest. A sister betrays a sister. A woman takes on the persona of a dead prostitute. All are in search of that which eludes them: an acknowledgement of a shared past, the fulfillment of a secret desire, a n tenuous connection made whole. Within I AM HOLDING YOUR HAND an array of tender, stark, authentic, and sometimes very lost souls discover a reason to live through their capacity to see beauty in the everyday and instead of coming to conclusions, they discover a way to begin again. "I AM HOLDING YOUR HAND is a heartfelt collection of deaths: deaths of people, dreams, love, and hope. In this gritty collection, Myfanwy Collins gives voice to characters learning to live on despite such deaths. Characters who often act badly, but who are all the more believable and sympathetic because of their mistakes, failings, and struggles. Myfanwy Collins brings such compassion and tenderness to her stories while never sparing the stark truths. One of her characters tells us, The air was so sparse that our breath whispered back into our mouths to feed us. These stories whispered into me. They fed me."&mdash;Ethel Rohan

I Am Holding Your Hand

Collins, Myfanwy

Literature & Fiction

PANK Books

Fiction. Women's Studies. YOU COULD STOP IT HERE is about girls who are trapped. From the suburbs of Austin to the sublets of New York City, they are searching for an escape from destructive relationships, parents caught up in second romances and Bunko, and the embarrassments of adolescence. Their beliefs that bravery is transformative lead them to make risky decisions that promise shaky rewards: the attentions of an older lover, an idolized sister's approval, or the preservation of a forbidden relationship. This is a collection about accepting the wrong invitations, the rush to be unburdened by innocence, and the desires, both juvenile and inevitable, that fuel irreparable mistakes. It is about the desperation and longing inherent in the struggle to become whole, and the realization that adulthood won't protect us from hurt.

YOU COULD STOP IT HERE

Egan, Stacy Austin

Short Stories & Anthologies

Poetry. African &amp; African American Studies. "And, of course, a natural inquiry is made: whose children will you be mourning as you still love? How many can you mourn all at once and is there an end? Will the condolence for us all ever rest outside the comma? I tug the reader, yes, place them befuddled in what befuddles me. Some days, this work was the only body with which I would feel safe to watch the rooms inside me be processed, accessed, revisited; if it too carries endless oscillating rooms, a black tesseract might be another attempt at the human's time here."

Self-portrait as the space between us

Depass, Trace Howard

Poetry

Fiction. LGBTQIA Studies. THE CANARY KEEPER himself is a failed actor, the kind of person no one wants to listen to at parties, but the eponymous play he stars in features characters eking out existence while in search of their own curtain calls, a chance to hear the applause before the silence sets in. Artist-citizens from the fictional Market Town look to the dimming spotlight and cannot decide its meaning: are they destined for burn-out or blinded by fantasies of themselves as small-town stars? They mark time by way of darkened, lonely highways, indifference from people in power, and the search for opportunity beyond the boredom of Oklahoma's borders. They step forward, clear their throats, and laugh at their ability to wait in the wings forever, longing for escape to the green room and anticipating that fateful moment when the stage manager says Go.

The Canary Keeper

Cox, Dinah

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Women's Studies. Set just before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, HOW TO LOVE THE WORLD is at once a condemnation of the world, a daydream of America, and an unsent love letter--written and rewritten over the course of ten years--to a dead family. A meditation on intergenerational trauma, resilience, and hope, HOW TO LOVE THE WORLD is written in the tradition of epic poetry and follows the author as she retraces her mother's journey to New York City in the summer of '89. A Jewish-Uyghur refugee, the author is born along the way, marking the unclear boundary when the memory of a family becomes historical memory, loss the condition of a new beginning. HOW TO LOVE THE WORLD casts refugee women and daughters as the rightful judges of the world and the world as the rightful home of all human beings.

How to Love the World

Basevich, Elvira

Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. Taking its inspiration from the artist Uta Barth's photographs of the sun as it enters her home and the poet Francis Ponge's notebooks kept during the German occupation of France, this collection of lyric essays contemplates light as seen through the domestic space and its occupants, predominantly the author's young children. Meditations on how through light the external world enters into and transforms the private spaces of self and home inextricably link to the author's writing on life, or the giving of life. These vocabularies weave and tangle while the essays' forms depict the staccato rhythms of thought and the estrangement of time one experiences when living with children. The essays can be read as standalone pieces, yet build on one another so that patterns emerge, like the obviation of how language serves to illuminate and veil meaning, the repetition of and ekphrastic approach to religious imagery, and the ineffable experience of depression. These essays continually return to the speaker's admission that the life one gives another is ultimately unsustainable and that despite this catastrophe of living there is the resilience and bewilderment of being together.

To Limn / Lying In

Chapman, J'Lyn

Essays & Correspondence

Poetry. Drama. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies. In a country grappling with its bloody history and uncertain future, HOW TO EXTERMINATE THE BLACK WOMAN illuminates the struggle of the Black woman trying to thrive in a society seeking to consume and erase her. Set after the murder of Sandra Bland, or Trayvon Martin, or Emmett Till, this choreopoem takes place in the collective memory of American Black women, represented by Angela fractured into six emotions: fear, loss, silence, expectation, fury, and new. Through chanted sestinas, yoga-inspired dances, and a chorus of the subconscious, HOW TO EXTERMINATE THE BLACK WOMAN confronts readers and audiences with the terrors and triumphs that mark Black women in the United States, from burying their murdered children and surviving rape to going natural and falling in love. More than just #BlackGirlMagic, this choreopoem casts a literary spell, demanding empathy, action, and humanity from the stage.

How to Exterminate the Black Woman

Prince, Monica

Dramas & Plays

Literary Nonfiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. THE YELLOW BOOK, a cross-genre meditation on what it means to be Korean/American and write, begins with a moment of doubt, in which the speaker, forced into speech by his interlocutor, is no longer sure he is who he is: "You sure you're not Jackie Chan? [...] Honestly, I say, I don't even know." The speaker opts for camouflage, transformation, and evasion. The book, similarly, aims to elude identification, to contradict itself. It moves broken-tongued, between memoir and essay and poem, between body and footnote, between Korean memory and English utterance, between remembrance and forgetfulness, between history and fiction. Populated by a varied cast of characters--a god, a bear, a tiger, Mr. Miyagi, Jack London, a fictionalized version of Civil War general Franz Sigel, and a non-fictitious chihuahua--THE YELLOW BOOK is a travelogue, a picaresque, a mythology, a catalog of grievances, an act of revenge, an apology, a joke book, a defiance, an obeisance, a performance, a slander, a love letter, a manifesto, a refutation.

The Yellow Book

Cha, Sam

Poetry. TIGERS is an exploration of a series of mutigenerational landscapes of the feminine--female adolescence, womanhood, motherhood, and personal revelation. Where the traditional coming of age story moves from "innocence to experience," TIGERS moves, through the excavation of trauma, addiction, recovery, adolescence, parenthood, and punk rock, from the ignorance and misunderstanding of a youth's misbegotten "toughness," into a turning inward toward tenderness and resilience--toward, in essence, what it really takes to be mature, "tough," and--tigerly. With a principle focus on the dangers threatening girlhood, this book examines not merely the threat of degradation and assault, but, more deeply, the squandering of love through ignorance and inattention. TIGERS here surely serve as symbols for such outward and inward threat, but also as a sign of the mature and tender maternal toughness of youth-grown-wise through trial and reclamation.

Tigers

Young, Kim

Poetry. What use is poetry in a world shaped by suffering? Set in an Italian castle during a time of global crisis, this sonnet sequence takes up age-old questions about the ethics of art and the risks of comfort. With lush images and deep urgency, Deshpande makes an argument for beauty amidst chaos, violence and loss.

The Umbrian Sonnets

Deshpande, Jay

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